There is an argument that waltzes ought be notated in 6/8 (as they originally were in Mozart's time) - the steps take six beats to complete. Maybe somebody was thinking of Eileen Aroon as a waltz - it dates back to about the time waltzes were invented.

For a lot of tunes it makes no difference. A tune in 3/4 may well have the odd-numbered bars starting with a heavier stress than the even-numbered ones, which is what happens in one bar of six-time. You pick the time signature for readibility and to fit in with established conventions - nobody would notate a newly composed waltz in 6/8 even though it might be theoretically more logical.

Steve many tunes are performed differently by diferent performers, or by the same performer at different times. Indeed one the arts of the musician is to be able to adapt a tune for different dances. And as musicians we have the tools to describe how we are doing this; in this case time signatures, which we use to describe the basic flow of the tune. Fanny is often played as a waltz in 3/4 time, but just as often rather slower, in 6/4 or even 12/8 (which sounds as though it should be fast, and can be; but isn't always - a piece from roughly the same period, Messiah_-_How_beautiful_are_the_feet; Score and here , sung by Joan Sutherland - although probably a little slower, has a similar rhythm). How O'Carolan originally conceived it being played we shall never know.

Possibly 6/8 was more favoured by past composers, as Jack has said. Scott Skinner's "Hector the Hero" is written by himself in 6/8 (original score on Aberdeen University website), but most modern scores are in 3/4. Perhaps the more important thing is not to classify all 6/8s as jigs (and here in Scotland we have a lot of dotted 6/8 marches). And not all 3/4s are waltzes: many are slow airs. In the end, it's more about how you play it.

I can play mouth organ, tin whistle and, occasionally with simple tunes, anglo concertina by ear. I am talking about a piano accordion in this case and I am still learning so need to know what the chords are. I find the sheet music the best way for that as if I was doing the chords by ear I would probably stick to G, C and D for this. Looking at the music you find a couple of E minors and A minors. My ear is not good enough to pick those out so, sorry Steve, if that makes me bad person, so be it ;-)

One person's "error" is another person's spark of inspiration. It's is a bit like the English language like wot she is spoke on Mudcat. You can be deliberately colourful in an "erroneous" way or you can be ignorantly inelegant. Same with music. The trick for a musician worth his or her salt is to be able to tell the difference. There are uninspired chords, imaginative chords (some of which may grate for some people) and there are downright wrong chords. Sometimes, any chords at all are the wrong chords. There is subtle and sublime variation springing from the long experience of an accomplished player, there are misheard notes that don't matter much and there are downright bum notes. Then there are clever clogs who are serving themselves instead of the music. Taste blurs all these categories round the edges a bit.

I must say that there are also errors and wrong notes and/or chords in written music. You don't notice too much unless you are playing both melody and accompaniment. You play it as is writ and your ear says 'bugger off, that just ain't right!' so you adjust either the chord or the note so it is no longer discordant. There is also the question of your brain saying 'bugger off, that is too complicated' and coming up with a routine that fits perfectly but the old hands can cope with :-)

Checking how it?s noted in the O?Neill?s collection, I see that Fanny is in 6/8 time, but whether it was that originally is unlikely since O?Neill would have probably standardised it to suit musicians and dances of the time.The 3/4 waltz that most of us tend to play nowadays, relates to a dance that only became popular in the late 1800s and these tunes predate that era. In old tune books many tunes are found in time signatures that most of us would now shy away from, eg. hornpipes appear in 3/8. That?s probably not just about comfort zones, but also changes in popular instrumentation, with 3/4 and 4/4 being easy for guitars and squeeze boxes.

Choice of key is also interesting, because O?Neill chose A major, presumably for fiddlers, but how many of you would play Fanny in that key now? Likewise many Early English tunes were played or at least notated in F, Bb, Gm, etc. Melodeons must take some of the blame of course because those other keys are well suited to fiddles, whistles, flutes, mandolins, accordians, trumpets, concertinas, etc. Are we less sophisticated than our forebears? You only have to look at sheet music for popular songs of yesteryear to see how varied they were in choice of rhythm, key and chordal progressions, compared to the typical chordal strums in unrelenting 4/4 that pass for a lot of pop music today.

. 'O?Neill would have probably standardised it to suit musicians and dances of the time.The 3/4 waltz that most of us tend to play nowadays, relates to a dance that only became popular in the late 1800s and these tunes predate that era'

Only, Carolan tunes were not dance tunes so the whole argument falls flat.

Wht would 3/4 and 4/4 be easier for guitars and squeeze box than other time signatures or just plain easy for those instruments? The buttons pressed and finger positions made would be exactly the same. The rhythm and accentuation would be entirely in the control of the musician. If you think compound time signatures are hard it's only because you haven't learnt to count them (I can't do 5/8 and 7/8) and once you can do that it's irrelevant what instrument you play them on.

Not entirely, because whilst they were written as Airs, people have subsequently rightly or wrongly turned them into dance tunes, typically dancing 32 bar folk dances in 3/4 time to them. Call it the Folk process if you like, but the point is people have standardised them to suit musicians and dances of the time.

Sorry, missed the intervening post. I don?t disagree with what you say, but some instruments lend themselves to playing in easy time signatures more readily than others in my experience. Maybe it is the physical movement of pushing in and out with squeeze boxes, and the rotational strumming motion with a guitar, that comes almost naturally. Finger picking on guitar is also a doddle in 4\4 but gets surprisingly tricky in more compound time signatures.

On unisonoric squeezeboxs bellows movement is usually done with the phrasing so that is separate from the time signature. Accentuation would be done by increasing or decreasing the pressure during the movement. On bisonoric instruments the bellows direction can change from note to note and often has to. I don't play guitar but I would imagine that odd (as opposed to even) time signatures would mean changing the stress from the up stroke to the down stroke and vise versa but is it any harder for 5/4 as opposed to 3/4, say?

I reckon that that is harder on guitar, and not just because of unfamiliarity with counting out different beat patterns. 3/4 can be done bar after bar with the same pick pattern, but would 5/4 become a two bar pattern maybe? It certainly takes you out of beginners territory. In a similar vein, why is a forward roll on five string banjo much easier than a backward roll? There is no obvious reason why it should be.

I think the earliest known copy of Fanny Power is in the 1840 edition of Bunting (presumably transcribed in 1792, though) where it's in 6/8, in D, intended for the piano, and just called "Fanny Power", with no "Planxty" in the title (though many other tunes in the collection are called that). The collection is on IMSLP.

There are lots of articulation marks; Bunting was obviously keen to get it right. Apart from the key, it hasn't mutated much from that, people still play it in much the same way. I would bet Steve Shaw does too, despite his insistence on orality.

By 1840, waltzes were an established form in the British Isles, and it was standard to write them in 3/4. If Bunting had seen it as a waltz he'd have said so.

I just checked the versions of Fanny Power which is shown in 6/8 time in both of these books.

In the Ossian Publications (1984) book with one of the longest book titles in the world: "Complete Collection of the Much Admired Old Irish Tunes: The Original and Genuine Compofitions of Carolan The Celebrated Harper and Compofer (1670-1738) Suitable for Moft Infruments (sic)" - seriously!

But the Bunting book title is EVEN LONGER!!

Edward Bunting (1840): "The Ancient Music of Ireland Arranged for the Piano Forte To Which is Prefixed A Dissertation on The Irish Harp and Harpers Including an Account of the Melodies of Ireland". Note: my copy was reissued in 1969.

Well, where was I before all that? Oh yes, both books show FP in 6/8 time. The first book has it in the key of F Major, and the second in D Major.

Derek Bell's sheet music book, Carolan's Receipt, published in 1972? shows it in 3/4 in the key of G Major.

O'Neill's book has it in 6/8 in the key of A Major.

So, experts differ but the earliest transcription shows it in 6/8. That doesn't necessarily mean that the man himself played it that way because the Bunting transcriptions were taken from other harpers who were keeping up the Carolan tradition after he himself went upstairs to play with the angels.

Steve> if you can do it all aurally, by memory, without the dots, I envy you. I can try for weeks to memorise something, and still make a mess of it in public; though I could sightread almost anything till the sight got a bit iffY. You mention the spoken/written language. Because you know the grammar, you are able to write seriously, make jokes and puns, and understand different dialects. And you write english well enough. So why not music (rhetorical question). Perhaps with a good memory you don't need to?

Jack> those made me giggle!

Manitas> one of the first things I noticed when I came into folk was that some tunes fitted the fiddle and others didn't. Then I realised that they either were written for a different instrument, or I'd heard a version modified for a different instrument. After a while it's possible to make out characteristic finger petterns in a tune, that betray its (apparent) origins.

I'm always amazed that while we (and that includes a whole terrible lot of people) are all musicians, we are all so different, and have such different gifts.

Well I've never played the ends of the A and B parts like that, Jack, and I haven't come across anyone, either in person or on record, who does. That doesn't mean no-one does, as it's one tune out of hundreds that I play and I haven't done me scholarship on it. The other thing is the sequence of same-pitch notes in the second and fourth bars of the B part. Does anyone play it like that? I suppose you could as a sort of harmonising device. I note Bunting's injunction to play it "gracefully." If you can play this tune faster than quite slow, and jiggishly to boot, and still make it sound graceful, you're a better man than I am!

Where does "jiggishly" come from? There's nothing in Bunting's score to suggest that. His metronome mark ("Mael." for Maelzel) is 88, which is too slow for a jig and too fast for a 6/8 march - there isn't really a name for that metre/tempo in British Isles trad music. I can't recall hearing that speed often used for this tune.

I think I misread Bunting's tempo. His unit of metronome time isn't very clear - what does a vertical line mean? (I can't see it used elsewhere, maybe the notehead got lost?) The pendulum length he gives, 16 inches, corresponds to a metronome mark of 46.8, which is fairly slow.

It would be way cool to pull a pendulum with an inch-marked string out of your pocket to set the tempo in a session. Or you could just use your iPhone with a string round it.

It occurred to me that if you're using a weight-on-a-string pendulum for tempo measurement, you're more likely to use a half-period as the unit. And quite likely the string will be measured from an attachment at the top of the weight, rather than the centre of mass, slightly increasing the period. So Bunting's metronome mark and pendulum length would be consistent after all.

I've never seen pendulum length in a score before. And this was 20 years after the metronome came into use. Presumably some folks looked at those expensive mahogany-cased gadgets and thought "hey, maybe we can do the same thing for a fraction of the dosh".

Anyone wanting authoritative guidance on how to play any Carolan tune could do worse than consult Caitriona (sorry, I can't remember how to do the fada) Rowsome's "The Complete Carolan Songs & Airs Arranged for the Irish Harp". FWIW she calls it "Fanny Power" (without the "Planxty") and notates it as 6/8. She gives a bass line (rather than chords, these being harp settings) having two groups of three beats, not three twos.

In Bunting FP is marked "Distinctly and Gracefully". In the Ossian Publication version it says "Grazioso", and Derek Bell's version is marked "Allegro ma non troppo".

In Bunting's three sections of the book only five in the first, eight in the second, and seven in the third are named as a Planxty. There are a large number of Carolan tunes named for people in the whole book so only a handful had the word Planxty as a prefix.

In O'Neill's book, the English version of the surname written above the music is "Powers", but the Irish version does not have an "s" on the end, and neither does the tune name in the index, so I think the added "s" was a typo.

Richard Mellish, thanks for the recommendation of Caitriona Rowsome's book.

and the use of pendulum length would explain the otherwise slightly obscure reference to "nine inches" in 'Celia at the virginals' (mudcat threadid=23892; but I can't get it to make a link) a beautiful double- entendre (9" = 125 to the minute)!!

You will notice that while playing FP, Dearbhail is tapping her foot twice per bar which gives a clueregarding the above discussion - 3/4 or 6/8 time? She would be tapping three times per bar if she thought it was a waltz time.

I found Dearbhail Finnegan's video by searching for Caitriona Rowsome, after Richard Mellish's recommendation of her book. My search led me to a harp duet performed by these two ladies, and then I found the Fanny Power video.

(By the way, if I search on Google for Fanny Power, the "intelligent" search keeps wanting to suggest Fanny Pack and not Fanny Power.)

If a piece is in fast 3/4 you'll tap your foot one in a bar. If it's in medium 6/8 you'll tap two in a bar. So notating the same tune at the same speed two different ways will give you the same foot taps.

Most of it's in 6/8 (slower than a jig) but it uses hemiola in one section which is better thought of as in 3/4. I can't really imagine tapping your feet through it at all, but if you tried the taps wouldn't all be at the same speed. This is my partial attempt at notating it (I will probably revise this):

Interesting, in the light of this discussion, that a friend has just scored a tune we'd agreed to play together, in 6/8, whereas I would have done it in 3/4! Guess we'll just make it sound nice whatever way. And then, to keep Steve happy, we'll throw the dots away.

"A Pair of Brown Eyes" - and what about "Two Lovely Black Eyes"? A poor old lady answering to that description was sitting in the front row when we were playing an afternoon tea gig - she had obviously made painful contact with something a day or 2 before.

Fairytale of NewYork. Rainy Night In Soho. Great waltzes! Shane, I love you baby!

I've played Fanny Power a thousand million times and the rhythm of the thing to me is a waltz. Not jiggiferous, even at slow tempo. By the way, I think that Dearbhail Finnegan ruined the tune by playing it so fast, in spite of her wonderful harping. I tried her version on Mrs Steve and she was totally horrified. Mind you, she only knows it from me playing it a thousand million times. For God's sake we could do with a lot more waltzes.

All just m'humble, of course!

I notice she also did Eleanor Plunkett. I played that in the Welly in Boscastle one night in about 1994 with P?l Brennan, Enya's brother. In 2004, when I was making my one and only CD with Martin Cole, after a very frustrating day on which we'd recorded absolutely nothing, we had a completely unrehearsed crack at Eleanor Plunkett, just a single take in three minutes, just for a laugh and to wind ourselves down. It's my favourite track on my CD. .

Genuine musical question here for the more technically adept that me, IE, most people! I can understand what Jack means about tapping 2 to the bar in 6/8 but from what I understand, and how I hear it, jigs do not emphasise, for instance, 1 and 4. On accordion the bass provides the emphasis and the lift to the tune. Depending how it fits, I would be playing bass/chord/chord on a 3/4 while a 6/8 would be bass/chord/rest/bass/chord/rest or bass/rest/chord/bass/rest/chord to give much more of a heartbeat type rhythm. Fanny Power does not have that 'pulse' when I hear it so I play bass/chord/chord, which works in either 3/4/ or 6/8 but does not come across as a jig. Is that right or am I missing something?

As for foot-tapping, we had a bloke who occasionally joined us whose feet you didn't dare look at while he was playing. His tapping bore no relation whatsoever to the rhythm or tempo of the music, though he was a really good player. I spent years cultivating a timekeeper inside my head in order to quit my foot-tapping habit. It's a good job symphony orchestras don't all tap their feet...

"If a piece is in fast 3/4 you'll tap your foot one in a bar. If it's in medium 6/8 you'll tap two in a bar. So notating the same tune at the same speed two different ways will give you the same foot taps." there is a significant difference as i understand it in 6/8 there is more emphasis on first beat than fourth beat,in 3/4 when it is waltz time there is emphasis on first beat, but 3/4 for other than waltz time can have different emphasis The mazurka (in Polish mazurek, plural mazurki) is a Polish folk dance in triple meter, usually at a lively tempo, and with "strong accents unsystematically placed on the second or third beat"[2].

Some nice mazurkas in Irish music too, Dick. Unfortunately, they're too often played as if they were fast waltzes. There should definitely be some stress on the second beat and there's a "catch" on that second beat at the end of the A and B parts. Make 'em distinct, say I!

Well I started my musical ensemble playing in a "classical" orchestra: you'd have got thrown out for any foot-tapping! ( Which does seem to be actively encouraged in the folk/trad world.)

And has anyone yet mentioned Scandinavian polskas? In 3/4, but ften with a heavily accented second beat of the bar. And Guest 03.11.17 , I hadn't forgotten mazurkas, but just did not write that down. But could you expand on "not all waltzes are 3/4"? 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 or what?

> And has anyone yet mentioned Scandinavian polskas? In 3/4, but ften with a heavily accented second beat of the bar. And Guest 03.11.17 , I hadn't forgotten mazurkas, but just did not write that down. But could you expand on "not all waltzes are 3/4"? 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 or what?

For once I will refrain from muttering about polskas and instead mention that France has valses impairs (hope I've spelt that right), i.e. "unequal" waltzes, for example in 5-time (beats in groups of 2 and 3) and 11-time (beats in groups of 3, 3, 2 and 3).

If a piece is in fast 3/4 you'll tap your foot one in a bar. If it's in medium 6/8 you'll tap two in a bar. So notating the same tune at the same speed two different ways will give you the same foot taps. there is a significant difference as i understand it in 6/8 there is more emphasis on first beat than fourth beat,in 3/4 when it is waltz time there is emphasis on first beat

But the waltz step pattern takes 6 beats - it makes no difference whether you write that as two bars of 3-time or one bar of 6-time. The earliest waltzes were usually written in 6/8 and it took decades for people to settle on 3/4 as the preferred way (probably because melodies got increasingly complicated and it's easier to subdivide longer note values).

has anyone yet mentioned Scandinavian polskas? In 3/4, but ften with a heavily accented second beat of the bar. And Guest 03.11.17 , I hadn't forgotten mazurkas, but just did not write that down. But could you expand on "not all waltzes are 3/4"? 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 or what?

Mazurkas are often written 3/4 but played 9/8. There are quite a few waltzes from north-eastern France that aren't in 3 - you get 5/8, 8/8 and 11/8.

I think it does make some difference for dancers. The ballroom waltz does involve 6 steps to execute a turn, but over two bars of music, whereas to dance 6 to each bar makes it the more energetic and less danced Viennese Waltz.